There wasn’t really any way to know if we were going in the right direction or not, so we just picked one and pressed on. I had no idea how vast and deep the forest was. It seemed endlessly more vast than it felt when I had looked out the cabin window at the wilderness. Now, it seemed like the more we walked, the deeper we got, and the more forest there continued to be. It almost felt like the forest was growing around us. I was slightly nervous about finding our way back out of here, but Michael assured me that he had the navigation under control and knew how to get us home.

We didn’t talk much while we walked. Michael mostly searched the ground and the landscape around us for any indication that Rob had been there, and Adam walked beside me intermittently calling out to see if Rob would answer him. Every once in a while, he struck up conversation about something that we saw in the woods, and I was grateful for it because it eased the tension between the three of us for a few minutes.

When it started to get dark again, we found another spot to camp and Michael pitched the tent. This time, I helped Adam make the fire. It was cold, and it seemed to be getting colder by the minute. The temperature wasn’t so bad during the day when the sun was out and we were moving, but at night when it got dark and we stopped to sit, the cold really set into my bones. Once the fire was made, Adam took out the blanket again and he came to sit next to me. He spread the blanket out over us and snuggled against me beneath it, rubbing my shoulders to warm me up. Between the blanket, the fire, and Adam, I started to feel a little warmer and my teeth stopped chattering. When Michael came down to sit at the fire with us, I could immediately sense that he wasn’t happy about how close Adam and I were sitting. I had a feeling he was also wondering what Adam’s hands were doing beneath the blanket, but aside from holding mine to warm them up, it was completely innocent. In my mind, nothing had changed. I knew and held out hope that somehow, we would find the proof that showed Michael and I weren’t siblings, and therefore I wasn’t thinking about anything differently. I chose Michael as the man that I wanted to be with forever, and that was unchanged in my mind. We belonged to each other, and he had nothing to worry about. But still, there wasn’t really anything that I could do to ease his worries about it at the current moment. And I was cold and could still love Adam and be close to him under a blanket as we kept warm.

“Do you want to come under the blanket with us?” I asked as Michael reached for the half-filled whiskey bottle.

“No,” he replied gruffly.

He looked cold—and mad.

“We’ll need to head back tomorrow,” Adam said. “We don’t have enough supplies to last another night out here and it will take us two days to get back to the cabin.”

Michael simply nodded as he put the lip of the whiskey bottle to his lips and tossed his head back for a large swig of its contents. He held it out, offering it to us, and I eagerly took it. The whiskey was able to provide a warmth on the inside of my body that nothing else could do; at least not anything else that I could do and have right now. I looked at Michael after I handed the bottle to Adam, and I wished that he knew how much I was suffering and longing for him too.

We didn’t stay out and talk too much longer. The night was definitely getting colder and the wind was picking up. We were all tired, there wasn’t much food left, and I think that we were all feeling pretty defeated about not being any closer to finding Rob.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. “We can’t just head back and give up on him.”

“No one is giving up on him,” Michael answered. “We’ll go back, resupply, and head out in the other direction.”

“At some point we’re going to need to come to terms with the fact that we either need to get more help, or that Rob is gone,” Adam said sadly. “Days upon days out here searching in the freezing forest, and days upon days of Rob being out here by himself without supplies; none of that bodes well for a successful outcome. I’m not trying to be a downer; I’m just saying that at some point we need to be resigned to the fact that what we’re doing isn’t making a difference and we’ll need to change course.”

I wanted to tell Adam that he was wrong, and I wanted to be angry at him for even suggesting it. But I couldn’t because I knew that he was right. It only made me sad, not angry.

“We’re not going to give up on him,” I said softly. “If we don’t find him after another try, then we’ll go into the town and get help.”

The three of us seemed to be in agreement on that plan. After a few more swigs of whiskey, which left only enough for tomorrow night’s campfire, we all headed into the tent to try and get some sleep. I was so tired that I felt like I could sleep for days, no matter what the conditions were.

“Here, get closer,” Adam said as he wrapped his hands around the back of my waist and pulled me into him. “It’s really cold tonight and you look like you could use all the body heat you can get.”

He wasn’t wrong; it was freezing, even inside the tent. But as he pulled me closer and threw one of his legs over me, I could feel it tug the other side of the blanket next to Michael and without looking I could feel Michael’s frustration amp up several levels. Adam moved his body so that he was almost halfway lying on top of me, and he rubbed his hands all down the back of my body to try and warm me. Except, it was a little bit more than warming. It felt as if he was trying to seduce me in order to intentionally piss off Michael. I didn’t pay it much attention and tried just to soak in the warmth and close my eyes and get some sleep. But when Adam suggested that we take some clothes off and get skin-to-skin to stay warmer, Michael made an audible huff and tugged on the blanket.

“What’s your problem?” Adam said as he pulled the blanket back.

“You know what my problem is,” Michael said in a provoked tone. “You’re asking Lisette to take her clothes off in the tent in front of me because you’re trying to get in her pants.”

“I’m offering that we both take our clothes off so that I can help to keep her warm,” Adam retorted. “Because it’s obviously not something that you can do anything about since she’s your sister.”

“That hasn’t been proven yet,” Michael said.

“It hasn’t been disproven yet either,” Adam reminded him.

“Guys come on,” I interrupted. “I’m not taking my clothes off. I’m warm enough under the blanket, so there’s no need for this.”

“It’s not even about being warm, Lisette,” Michael said. “It’s about Adam trying to constantly steal you from me, just like he’s trying to do now.”

“Well, I can’t really steal her from you now that she’s not yours anymore, can I?”

“Adam, stop!” I yelled at him. He was seriously just making matters worse, which I knew would end up in Michael having some sort of emotional implosion.

As predicted, Michael was too mad to deal with it anymore without doing something he shouldn’t. So, he got up and stormed out of the tent instead. It was pitch black out tonight with very little moonlight and biting cold temperatures. He couldn’t stay out there all night. He needed to come back inside the tent.

“Why do you do stuff like this?” I asked Adam.

I glared at him because I was mad. The last thing we needed right now was more controversy and more uncertainty to fuel the already uneasy flames.

“Do what?” he said as he acted innocently.

I rolled me eyes at him.

“Adam, you know very well what you did. Trying to stay warm is one thing but asking me to take off my clothes was another.”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” he said, getting annoyed. “It’s scientifically proven to be one of the best ways to stay warm.”

“Yes, maybe if there was no tent and it was below freezing out, which it is not. Honestly, you knew you were antagonizing him.”

“Maybe I did,” he said. “But who cares? Michael should be more focused on finding Rob and less focused on himself.”

“Ugh!” I sighed heavily. “You two are both impossible.”

I got up to walk out of the tent too.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To find Michael and bring him back to the tent. He can’t spend the night outside.”

“That’s stupid,” Adam said. “He’s being dramatic, and he can come back on his own when he’s ready. You don’t need to go and chase after him.”

“Well, I’m going to. Because I know Michael and he’s stubborn enough not to come back and then he’s going to freeze.”

Adam said something under his breath about Michael acting like a spoiled brat, and then he started to get up too.

“Fine, I’ll come with you to look for him, but bets are that he’s probably just sitting by the fire filling himself with whiskey.”

“No,” I said, putting my hand up. “You stay here. Having you come with me just means that he won’t come back. It won’t help matters at all.”

“Well, be quick about it then,” he said as he laid back down.

Both of these men were acting like toddlers having tantrums. I was mad at Adam for provoking Michael, and I was mad at Michael for storming off in the middle of the night. I had been hoping that Adam was right, and that Michael would just be right outside sitting by the fire. But I wasn’t surprised to see that he wasn’t there. I knew Michael better than anyone and I knew that he didn’t ever do things for effect; he did them because he was truly hurting. Which meant that he likely walked a good distance away to clear his head. I started to look around the campsite, trying to stay within the light of the bonfire and not wander too far because I knew my sense of direction was ridiculously awful. But it ended up even being more ridiculously awful than I had expected, and after having gone too far outside the reach of the light from the fire, I got turned around. It was dark, and everything around me looked the same. I walked a bit further in the direction that I thought was the right way, but I still didn’t see the bonfire. I should have stopped and started calling out to Adam. He would have heard me and come to get me. But instead, I was stupid and thought that I would try the other direction instead. I thought that surely if this direction hadn’t been the right one, then the opposite direction must be. The only problem with that theory, was that there were no “straight line” paths to take in a singular direction in the woods. By the time I walked around trees and over things on the ground, I didn’t even know if I was still pointed in the same way that I had started. By the time I finally realized that I should stop walking altogether and call out to Adam to help me, I was too far away for him to hear me.

“Great,” I said to myself aloud as I stood there in the dark, barely able to see my own hands in front of my face. “Now all four of us are separated from each other.”

I had literally no idea what to do now. I had zero sense of direction, no backpack, and nothing but my jacket to keep me warm. I couldn’t see anything and didn’t want to keep walking in case I was walking even further away from the campsite. I decided to feel around a little bit to at least find a large tree to curl up against; something to block the wind that whipped through the trees on the mountain. But it was so dark, and I was so turned around, that I kept tripping over everything; roots, rocks, fallen branches. It wasn’t until my foot got snagged under a large exposed root, that I realized my fall this time lasted longer than it should have. The ground seemed to not be beneath me when I fell, and I screamed as soon as it dawned on me that I was falling over the side of the mountain.

When I finally hit ground, and thankfully I must not have fallen too far over the mountain, because although it did hurt like hell, I was still alive. I must have landed on a ledge on the side of the mountain that caught my fall. But it was enough of a drop to knock the wind out of me and give me an instantaneous headache. It was also enough to injure my leg. I laid on the ground for a few minutes as I tried to catch my breath and wait for the pain that rattled through my body to abate. Then I tried to get to my feet, careful to make sure that there was ground around me to stand on so that I didn’t chance falling the rest of the way down, which I was sure would be the fatal leg of that fall. But when I went to move my leg, I found that I couldn’t, and that not only was the pain pretty intense, but that I didn’t seem to be able to get that leg to cooperate even if I could tolerate the pain. It was probably broken, or at the very least sprained or fractured enough that I was stuck here.

Perfect. It was dark and I was alone, and lost, and freezing. And now I had the extra bonus of being injured and unable to move as I laid out here on some precarious ledge of rock that I couldn’t get off of. I thought about screaming and then realized that it wouldn’t do me any good because no one was likely to hear me. So instead, I laid there looking up at the stars in the sky and trying to search for the dim, cloud-covered moon, hoping to fall asleep and still be alive in the morning.